Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State

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CULTURAL INTIMACY Second Edition

Social Poetics in the Nation-State

MICHAEL HERZFELD

ROUTlEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 100"16 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

109 8765432 I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herzfeld, Michael, 1947Cultmal intimacy: social poetics in the nation-state I Michael Herzfeld. - 2nd cd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-94740-5 (pbl. 'all. paper) 1. National state. 2. Minorities. 3. Group identity. 4. Ethnicity. 1. Tide. JC31l.H525 2004 320,54--dc22 2004008898

Fm'Iddo, Yoav, and Daniel

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

lX

Chapter One Introducing Cultural Intimacy

1

Chapter Two New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy

39

Chapter Three Of Definitions and Boundaries

73

Chapter Four Persuasive Resemblances

93

Chapter Five The Daugers of Metaphor: From Troubled Waters to Boiling Blood

111

Chapter Six Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe

127

Chapter Seven Structural Nostalgia: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete

147

Chapter Eight Social Poetics in Theory and Practice: Regular Guys and Irregular Practices

183

Chapter Nine The Practice of Stereotypes

201

Afterword: Toward a Militaut Middle Ground?

211

Notes

225

References cited

241

Index

269

Preface and Acknowledgments

Smashing huge numbers of cheap china plates across the feet of inebriated dancers is a practice that many a foreign visitor, prompted by popular films, happily anticipates on a trip to Greece. Under the military dictatorship, this practice was prohibited as both dangerous and demeaning in the eyes of foreigners; 5111311 printed notices everywhere announced, with mysterious incxplicitness for the uninitiated, "Breakage is forbidden:' But this turned out to be not just some arbitrary caprice of the colonels. Some years after their overthrow, the ban was revived. And a Greek friend assured me categorically that plate smashing was absolutely not a "Greek custom." This book has grown Ollt of my increasing fascination with the desire for control over the external images of a national culture that these denials and prohibitions express. Such evasive action often flies in the face of all the evidence, but it is sustained by what, to the outsider, can be an infuriatingly imperturbable air of total conviction: if we tell you that these things do not exist, then, as far as you are concerned, they do not exist. But the visitor is still left wondering why so much vehemence should be invested in denying what all the senses affirm. In this book I explore the grounds of this defensiveness. I examine the contrasts that the visitor to many a nation-state encounters between the presentation of the national culturewhat nationalist discourses personalize as "national character"and the presentation of individual selves within the intimacy of the national space. Smashing plates is a personal perfoIlnance of high spirits and unconstrained independence. The Greeks describe their national character in terms of this individualism and disregard for arbitrary authority; yet both the law and the cultural establishment decry the idea that smashing plates should represent Greekness to the rest of the world. What are the political IX

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forces that cause this strain between the creative presentation of the individual self-what in this book I call social poetics-and the formal image of a national or collcctive self? The issue is one that has become increasingly important for anthropologists and other students of culture. While we still study society and culture ethnographically-that is, by describing the minutiae of everyday life at a fairly microscopic level-our work is done in the context of far larger dynamics in which we ourselves are willy-nilly cast as the representatives of powerful and sometimes hated external forces. Nor can we ignore these entailments as our predecessors sometimes did with such blissful ease. To many people throughout the world we are both the signs and the agents of an intrusion, not just into private lives, but also into the privacy of nations-an intrusion into the collective space I have chosen to call cultural intimacy. Many dismiss what we study as trivial, as luere anecdote, and as irrelevant to the large concerns of the nation. But if these matters are so unimportant, why do people invest so much energy in dismissing them? Clearly, these reactions are diagnostic of a politics of significance in which much hinges on what is deemed important and what is relegated to the limbo of mereness. Anthropologists face such charges often, taxed with excessive interest in mere anecdote, mere hearsay, mere minorities , luere marginals and eccentrics. Arguments about the validity of anthropological scholarship take on the character of defenses put up by majority or elite forces against the violation of cultural intimacy. In these pages, I develop the concept of cultural intiluacy as one means of defining and understanding the sore zones of cultural sensitivity and to understand why officials so often seem to connive in perpetuating that sneaky persistence in everyday life. Inevitably for some readers this investigation, like any probe, risks irritating those tender spots even more. But if scholars are to think constructively about how far their responsibilities entail avoiding certain topics, or what kinds of political considerations their responsibilities to host communities and countries entail, they must ask some of these questions. They know from their field experiences that consensus is rare and, when it does fleetingly appear, is an unreliable guide to future reactions. Consequently, my first acknowledgment in the long list that follows must be a generic one. It is to all those who have so warmly accepted me as a virtual insider while knowing that the x

Preface and Acknowledgments

range of my subsequent conversations would not be confined to a narrow circle of knowing cultural intimates, but could casily hecome quite public. Since I began to push tbe compass of my field research beyond the permissible boundaries of officially sanctioned folklore in Greece more than two decades ago, I have been increasingly gratefnl to all those friends, far from few in number, who willingly tolerated and even encouraged such repeated trespasses. I can only reassure them in the language that is often used to defend the ramparts of cultural intimacy: this is not a peculiarly Greek problem. In fact, this book is not specifically about Greece. Although for obvious reasons it is heavily grounded in examples from my fieldwork there, I have made every effort to present the issues in terms of their global implications. My focus here is primarily comparative and analytic, and in this new edition also draws on my field experiences in Italy and Thailand. I have becOlue increasingly grateful over the years to those mentors and peers who shaped my first approaches to many of these issues. I continue to treasure critical advice: some colleagues read earlier versions of segments of this book in other incarnations and contexts and are recognized again here in the notes to the relevant chapters. I offer specific thanks here to those who read parts of the book (especially chapters 1 and 6) and commented on their appropriateness for the overall perspective: Marc Abeles, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Jill Dubisch, Davydd Greenwood, Stephen Gudeman, Sally Falk Moore, Peter Pels, and Rosalind Shaw. None of the kind people who have offered their gentle criticism over the years should be held responsible for my own peculiar uses of it, but my gratitude to them, eqoally, should not be in dou bt. I am also deeply indeb-ced to Luisa Passerini, whose invitation to address her seminar on European identity at the European University Institute in February 1994, led me to formulate the ideas laid out in chapter 6. Chapters 5 and 6 also received considerable impetus from Margaret Alexiou's warm invitation to deliver the 1991 Christopher Lecture at Harvard University, and chapter 9 was originally developed in the context of a Council for European Studies-sponsored workshop organized by Susan Carol Rogers and Marc Abeles. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere in various forms. I thank the publishers for permission to make use of the following (now substantially revised) materials:

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"Of Definitions and Boundaries: The Status of Culture in the Culture of the State," from Phyllis Pease Chock and June R. Wyman, eds., Discourse and the Social Life of Meaning. 1986. Washington, D.G: Smithsonian Institution Press, 77-93, now incorporated into chapter 3; "On Some Rhetorical Uses of Ieonicity in Cultural Ideologies," from Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner, cds., lconicity: Rssays on the Nature of Culture. 1986. Tiibingen: Stauffenberg, 401-19, now incorporated into chapter 4; "Les enjeux dl1 sang: 1a production officielle des stereotypes dans les Balkans. Le cas de la Grece," Anthropologie et societes 19 (1995): 37-52, now incorporated into chapter 5;

P1'e(ace and Acknowledgments

thanks go to them, to three anonymous reviewers who made generous recommendations regarding the organization of the book, and to a patient in-hoLlse copyeditor who dealt carefully and efficiently with the technical problems created by my stylistic vagaries over the Inany years of writing that have converged here. In the genesis and execution of the new edition, I express my appreciation to Michael Bickerstaff, Priti Gress, Salwa Jabado, Ilene Kalish, and Tao Woolfe, while at Harvard I am particularly indebted to Jenifer Paras, who heroically joined in the practicalities of shepherding the major changes and additions through the vagaries of a busy office in mid-semester. This new edition is appropriately dedicated to the new generation, and specifically to my three nephews, Idclo, Yoav, and Daniel Ussishkin.

"Pride and Perjury: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete," Man (n.s.) 25 (1990),305-22 (published by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London), now incorporated into chapter 7; "The Poeticity of the Commonplace," from Michael Herzfeld and Lucio Melazzo, cds., Semiotic Theory and Practice, vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruytcr, 383-91, now incorporated into chapter 8; "La pratique des sten'otypes," I;Homme 121 (JanuaryMarch 1992): 67-77 (published by the Ecole des Hantes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), now incorporated into chapter 9. Some further expressions of appreciation are very much in order here. Alexandra Molnar was a quick-witted and sensitive research assistant whose efficiency, computer skills, and ready understanding made the task of bringing the initially disparate segments of the book together hoth feasible and fnn. At Routledge I am fortunate to have worked with a remarkable series of editors: Ronda Angel, William Gennano, Marlie Wasserman, and Eric Zinner; all, at various times and in various ways, brought unexpected excitement to the task of building a new entity out of the detritus of old thoughts and discarded confusions. Warm xu

xiii

Chapter One

Introducing Cultural Intimacy

The Provisionality of the Permanent In recent years, anthropological interest in the state and in nation-

alism has belatedly taken on focus and inteusity.' Anthropologists have hitherto largely shunned the state as a hostile and invasive presence in local social life and have seen nationalislTI as an embarrassing first cousin to the discipline itself, OilC distinctly prone to public excesses of essentialism and reification. Now they

have at last begun to do what most appropriately falls within their competence, directing their interests to the experiences of citizens and functionaries rather than to questions of formal organization. Even so, they have often seemed to take official ideology as an accurate account of what the nation-state is actually about. This is very peculiar, because talking about "the state" in this way, as I have certainly done myself, reproduces the essentialism against which most of us rail with such predictable piety. Few are entirely innocent of this particular inconsistency. In practice, however, most anthropologists eventually discover that some citizens accept officially sanctioned cultural and legal nonns less willingly than others. Yet the nonconformists are often the most loyal of all citizens in monlents of crisis. Even in more peaceful times, the state commonly relies on a sense of unity that seems to spring from shared irreverence and defiance of the state itself. The current challenge for the discipline, one that I articulate in this book, is thus to probe behind fa~ades of national nnanimity in order to explore the possibilities and the limits of creative dissent. It is to stop treating both the nation-state and 1

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essentialism as distant and unreachable enemies of everyday experience, and to understand them instead as integral aspects of social life. That challenge is formidable. National harmony displays a deceptively smooth surface; it does not reveal the underlying fissures easily. The easy option is thus to ignore these fissures altogether. Many social scientists are consequently impatient with the anthropological interest in local-level detail. We can easily see how this scholarly complaisance with official perspectives develops. Even citizens who claim to oppose the state invoke itsimply by talking of "it" in that way-as the explanation of their failures and miseries, or accuse "it" of betraying the national interests of which it claims to be both expression and guardian. In the process, however, they all contribute, through these little acts of essentializing, to making it a permanent fixture in their lives. Few ever seem able to lnanage completely without it. Except, perhaps, in tilnes of quite exceptional turmoil, most citizens of lnost countries thus participate through their very discontent in the validation of the nation-state as the central legitimating authority in their lives. In this book, I try to get inside that engagement. I ask what advantages social actors find in using, reformulating, and recasting official idioms in the pursuit of often higWy unofficial personal goals, and how these actions-so often in direct contravention of state authority-actually constitute the state as well as a huge range of national and other identities. I aln especially concerned with the uses of cultural form as a cover for social action. This leads me to attempt to show how the control of cultural form allows significaut play with cultural content. In the process, I argue that state ideologies and the rhetorics of everyday social life are revealingly similar, both in how they make their claims and in what they arc used to achieve. Like social actors who use "the law" to legitimize self-interested actions, the state, conversely, uses a language of kin, family, and body to lend immediacy to its pronouncements. It thereby converts revolution into conformity, represents ethnic cleansing as national consensus and cultural hOlnogeneity, and recasts the sordid terrors of emergence into a seductive immortality. Because it is grounded in an idiom of social immediacy, however, this historical stremnlining never quite succeeds in concealing a residual sense of contradiction. That sense may provide opportunities for critique, and eternal truths can have surprisingly short lives. 2

Tntroducing Cultural Intimacy

The approach described here might be presented as exploring the relationship between the view from the bottom and the view from the top. I prefer, however, to treat "top" and "bottom" as but two of a host of refractions of a broadly shared cultural engagement (a more processual term than the static culture). Simplistic talk of "elites" and "ordinary people" conceals that common ground (as well as the fact that these terms are often themselves instruments in the negotiation of power) and so inhibits analysis. Comparable polarities, such as that between colonized and colonizer, may silnilarly obscure complex processes of creative cooptation in economic, political, and administrative practices-an issue now amply illustrated by the vicissitudes of both colonial and postcolonial regimes in Africa (Mbembe 1991; Pels 1996). We would do better not to privilege either angle of vision. What is the common ground that ultimately dissolves the possibility of clearly defined, immutable levels of power? Here I want to argue for the centrality of cultural intimacy~the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next InOlnent reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation. Cultural intimacy may erupt into pu blic life. This can take the form of ostentatious displays of those alleged national traits-American folksiness, British "muddling through," Greek mercantilecraftiness and sexual predation, or Israeli bluntness, to name just a few-that offer citizens a sense of defiant pride in the face of a more formal or official morality and, sometimes, of official disapproval as well. These are the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense. Among a minority population, their use rests on finding common ground with the encompassing society, as in the self-deprecating Jewish diaspora humor that exerts ironic moral pressure on local outsiders who understand and so can respond. I suggest that the model of cultural intimacy is a particularly apt concept for anthropologists to contribute to the study of nationalism (as well as to other idioms of identity formation), because it typically becomes manifest in the course of their long-term fieldwork, a site of social intimacy in the fullest sense. Anthropologists are in an unusually good position to know the forms of rueful selfrecognition in which people commonly engage. 3

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Central to the several themes developed in this book is tbe proposition that the formal operations of national states depend on coexistence-usually inconvenient, always uneasy-with various realizations of cultural intimacy. In the intimacy of a nation's secret spaces lie at least some of the original models of official practice. People recognize as falniliar, everyday phenomena some of officialdom's lTIDst formal devices, and this generates active skepticism about official claims and motives. Moreover, most citizens may agree that because the state is staffed by rapacious bureaucrats, too much obedience to the law is merely silly. That is hardly the stuff of which the rhetoric of national unity is officially made, yet it informs the lllutual recognition that one finds among a country's citizens everywhereeven among its state functionaries. For its part, a government Inay try to co-opt the language of intimacy for its utilitarian ends of commanding loyalty under what seeln to be the most unpropitious conditions. Indeed, in the face of globalizing processes, defensive domesticity can acquire a persuasive appeal. Domesticity is a common unage in this strategy. Faced with the disruption of its authoritarian control of information by the arrival of the Internet, the Vietnamese government reacted in revealing terms: " '''When we start to open our door, we find that fresh air and dust come in; said Pham Dao, director of the staterun Vietnam Datacommunications Co., which was establishing the country's Internet link at the time. 'We would like to keep the fresh air and prevent the dust''' (Wilhelm 1996). The image of a tranquil, old-fashioned domesticity not only covers a serious ultent to suppress dissent, but also attempts to make it palatable both at home and abroad. In an even nlore egregious exan1ple, Hastings Banda, the former president of Malawi, attempted to mitigate the seriousness of human rights abuses during his tenure of office by saying that he had been "selflessly dedicated ... to ti,e good cause of Mother Malawi" (Boston Globe, 6 January 1996, 7). In an earlier work (Herzfeld 1992a), I developed the thesis that bureaucrats, as citizens thelnselves, participated in a symbolic universe that furnished convenient explanations (a secular theodicy) for the obvious failures of democracy in a less-thauideal world; and I suggested that this universe and its legitimating cosmology were grounded in social experience at the Inost intimate levels-hence the frequency of bodily and familial metaphors as well as the everyday idiom of explaining defects in the system. Here, I examine further the direct mutual engagement 4

Introducing Cultural Intimacy

between the official state and the sometimes disruptive popular practices whose existence it often denies, but whose vitality is the ironic condition of its own continuation. Specifically, I treat the conceptual separation of state and people, so pervasive in academic and popular writings alike, as a symbolic construct, deserving of study in its own right. Why do people continually reify the state? Behind every such invocation lurk the desires and designs of real people. Paradoxically, they blame this ill-defined but all-important preseuee in their lives for their failures as they would a living human being and at the same time appeal to its impersonal "thingness" as the ultimate guarantee of disinterested authority. Conversely, and no less paradoxically, the sometimes suffocatingly formal ideology of the state lays claim to intimacy and familiarity in a series of rather obvious metaphors: the body politic, "our boys and girls," mother country and Vaterland, the wartime enemy as the (sometimes actual) rapist of mothers and daughters, and the tourist as a family guest. Moreover, like any person, the state-actually a shifting complex of people and roles-conceals its iuability to live strictly by its own superordinate rule.s behiud a blustery rhetoric of "national honor."3 In that rhetoric is the clearest evidence of what this book is largely about: that the nation-state's claims to affixed, eternal identity groundc.d in universal truth are themselves, like the Inoves of all social actors, strategic adjustments to the demands of the historical moment. This insistent parallelism with a community of familiar faces is the basis of Anderson's (1983) image of the nationalist goal as an "imagined community." But this justly celebrated formulation requires at least two modifications. First, the metonymic extension of "those we know" to include a huge population is not confined to nation-states; they are not the only imagined communities. 4 Perha ps people everywhere usc the familiar building blocks of body, family, and kinship to make seuse of larger entities. This may indeed be the most purely social demonstration of Fernaudez's (1974) renowned definition of metaphor as "the predication of a sign upon an inchoate [human] subject." The second modification of Anderson's thesis concerns its topdown formulatiou. That Imagined Communities has been warmly received by most anthropologists is largely due to its recognition that understandulg the appeal of nationalism requires us to ask how aud why iudividual citizens respond to it. Why should people be willing to die for a formal abstraction? Some5

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times, as conscripts, or even as taxpayers, for example, they may feel that they have no real choice. But still the question remains: why the uncoerced enthusiasln that this form of self-sacrifice often seems to inspire? Anderson took a major step forward by pointing out that nationalism offered citizens a means of converting their own deaths into a shared iIrunortality. But he does not tell ns why this works so well and so often, nor does he tell us whether the actions of the converted exert a reciprocal effect on the cultural form of the evolving nation-state. This is the classic point of demarcation for the concerns of the anthropologist, and Anderson does not cross that line. He does not gronnd his account in the details of everyday lifesymbolism, commensality, family, aud friendship-that would make it convincing for each specific case or that might call for the recognition of the cultural specificity of each nationalism. In that regard, like Gellner (1983), he seems to assume that nationalisms are fundamentally alike in their debt to a common (European) origin and that they represent the imposition of an elite perspective on local cultural worlds; to the extent that local idioms are used, they bave often been recycled beyond recognition. The irony of this position is that it reproduces the very ideology that it purports to question. It says, in effect, that ordinary people have no impact on the form of their local nationalism: they are only followers. In addition, it usually overlooks the fact that, like the personal selfhood and family membership that provide the models, national identity comprises a generous measure of embarrassment together with all the idealized virtues. It is this rueful self-recognition, this inward acknowledgment of cultural intimacy, that all the top-down accounts of the nationstate miss.

Simulacra of Sociality Embarrassl11ent, rueful self-recognition: these are the key markers of what cultural intimacy is all about. They are not solely personal feelings, but describe the collective representation of intimacy. The less literally face-to-face the society we inhabit, the more obviously cultural idiOl11s become simulacra of social relations. This is less usefully described as a displacement of the real by empty signs, as Baudrillard (1988: 167) has argued,' than as an attempt to project familiar social experience onto unknown and often potentially threatening contexts. The marginal commu6

Introducing Cultural Intimacy

nities that used to be almost the exclusive focus of anthropological study are often the sources of the national-character models entertained by the very nationalists who are most disconcerted by the anthropological gaze-a point to which I return below (and, in more detail, in chapter 6). Those marginal communities are face-to-face societies. For international political and economic audiences, national leaders portray them as atypical of the new, modern reality embedded in a complex nexus of global communications. For the often humiliatingly self-abasing tourist trade, however, and in the romantic folklore of the urban elite, they embody d,e natioual quintessence. This disjuncture creates a perennial embarrassment: how is tradition to be recast as modernity, and rebelliousness as a love of (national) independence? For, as the state appropriates for its own purposes the local idioms of 111orality, custOl11, and the solidarity of kinship, it dismisses the local renditions themselves as conservative survivals, picturesque tradition, and familism, respectivelyall serious obstacles to the European nation-state's rationalist vision of modernity. Indeed, transnational modernity stretches the social metonyms hascd On face-to-face relations to the breaking point. In the United States and elsewhere, the packaging of politeness no longer tries to hide its nonliteral status; instead, it intensmesawareness of it, thereby further accentuating the ambiguity of the social relations that ride on it. This is the source of that frightful politeness with which the airline flight attendant or restaurant employee breathlessly announces an individuating personal name that denies any actual social identity: "Hi! My name's Leslie and I'm waiting on you tonight." Imagine the awkwardness that 111ust arise when some unsuspecting cultural novice responds in kind. Advertising slogans like "USAir begins with you" and "Fly the Friendly Skies of United" exude fabricated sociability. Like state ideologies that derive their reality frOlTI everyday bureaucratic encounters, these cookie-cutter social relations are sustained by an impressive forest of symbols in the form of false indcxicals in daily practice ("How are you today?" "Bye now"). These indexicals are patently false: they show how thinly the image of sociality has been stretched by what HochschiJd (1983: 11, 19) has apdy called the "emotional labor" involved in the "transmutation" of private sentiments into public acts. They are not simple falsehoods, however; they act out a pervasive nostalgia for "real" social relations. Such evocations of a 7

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balanced and conflict-free past are as common in social theory as they are in popular discourse: Mauss's illlage of an age when money had not yet corrupted pure reciprocity clearly rests on stereotypical assumptions about "the West" as much as about an orientalist "rest" (Carrier 1995b, 1995c) and exhibits a similar yearning for a time of pure structure. But social theory here seems merely a specialized case of what is, in fact, a widely popular notion. Thus, Cretan sheep-thieves similarly bemoan the necessity of bringing in the legal processes of the state where once, they say, the word of honor sufficed to establish guilt or innoceuce (chapter 7). But it is also precisely those who bewail the passing of the old ways who find in that process justification for adopting the new: accusing others of violating the ethic of reciprocity opens the way to nonreciprocal acts such as recourse to law. There is a curious symbiosis between the state's argument that it must intervene to prevent a final collapse of civic morality and the rebellious Cretan sheep-thieves' view that the collapse of their morality is wbat has necessitated the intervention of the state. Both are engaged in a symbolism of purity, and it is this connnon ground that makes loyal patriots in wartime out of citizens who in times of peace show rich inventiveness in tweaking the nose of the state.

Pervasive Essentialisms Because the sheep-thieves embody such an extreme position in the argument about representativity, this limiting case is especially central to my thesis that nationalislll and cultural intimacy are entwined in a mutual dependence. Ethnographic accounts (e.g., Gupta 1995)-intimate views of the nation-state in action-show that the realism that most citizens bring to their encounters with officialdom, far from undermining the conduct of state business, renders it cOlllprehensible. Such insight comes, however, at a certain cost to democratic and administrative ideals: citizens (including many bureaucrats) treat rules as though they existed primarily to serve particularistic interests. I do not intend a variant of the equilibrium model here: to say that graft actually helps to keep the state functioning may sometimes be true, but only in the sense that corrupt officials have already made sure that it will be true. But it is also the case that the moralistic ideology of a national culture appeals to people in part because it is usually coupled with the relief of knowing that even (or especially) officials do not always adhere scrupulously to 8

Introducing Cultural Intimacy

its austere principles but may use those principles exactly as other citizens do: as a strategy of self-interest. This is not an issue of determinism but of the practical constraints of social life: cultural intimacy is, above all, familiarity with perceived social flaws that offer culturally persuasive explanations of apparent deviations from the public interest. These flaws may even be used to explain the actions of those who obey the law or work to strengthen its institutions. In the midst of the great anticorruption drive in Italy, for example, even those who risked their lives to clean up the country's political life were often suspected of a particularly devious form of furberia~ a socially respected idiom of cunning (see Bailey 1973: 183-184; Schneider and Schneider 1994: 253), and the prosecution of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi-elected in part for his promises of clean government-as well as the deep suspicions expressed against members of the anti-Mafia nl0vement have only intensified such ambivalences. Serving the public interest, even with the most civic-minded intentions, may confer both specific and diffuse personal benefits as well. Most countries have countless honest and even altruistic citizens. The apparent overdetermination of official moralism, however, may in practice offer an enormous range of play to individual social actors regardless of their individual motives. Methodological individualism-treating the nation as merely the aggregate of its citizens' individual wills-is thus not an adequate description of these processes. It is in fact a reverse essentialism, politically expressed in Ronald Reagan's voluntarism and Margaret Thatcher's attempt-"there are only individuals"to argue the social out of existence altogether. Certainly, citizens engage in the ceaseless business of shaping the meaning of national identity, often in ways that contravene official ideology: politicians, civil servants, professionals, and intellectuals are "ordinary people" too, and anthropologists have been increasingly willing to treat them as ethnographically interesting. 6 But they, no less than the subjects of classic ethnographies, are also constrained by the sense of collective identity, however evanescent, that they help to create. It was not mere whimsy that led Marc Abeles (1989) to treat French politicians as a "tribe." Here the tribe of politicians is a collectivity tbat consists of different people doing a variety of things. SinUlarly, the state is not a monolithic, autonomous agent. I have often been tempted to treat it that way, following exasperated local friends who blame "it" for all their ills. But during fieldwork I also came to know and like a 9

1f I

Cultural Intimacy

host of officials (including police officers), bureaucrats, academic and artistic celebrities, and politicians, and I came to realize that they usually worked with the same assumptions and experienced the same constraints as did other citizens. The point is worth making because some readers have lnistakenly interpreted my insistence on recognizing the cultural force of cynicism as a comprehensive endorsement of that cynicism. 7 But it is important to recognize that bureaucrats who blanle the system-whether to avoid responsibility or because they are genuinely dismayed by their inability to help-participate in the same reification of the state as their most disgruntled clients. Like these citizens , officials both contribute to the creation of standardized views of the state and experience the constraints on action that result frOlu this constant process of reification. The option of blaming the state gives definition and authority to its shadowy power. An anthropology of nationalisms and nation-states lnust get inside this ongoing production of static truths. To do so means looking for it among all segments of the population, for all are implicated. The approach is thus neither "top-down" nor "bottom-up": except in a narrowly organizational sense, there is neither a discrete "top" nor a discrete "bottom." This is far from the perspective of most authorities on the theory of nationalism. Outside anthropology, only Hobsbawm stakes out a critique of the top-down perspective, arguing against Gellner on this point (Hobsbawm 1990: J 0-11). This seems to represent a substantive departure fronl Hobsbawlu's early work on social banditry (1959, 1969), in which he explicitly denies the possibility that "primitive rebels" might develop an ideology of their own, and from his introduction to the edited volume on the study of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm 1983). For Gellner (1983), the ideologies of particular nationalistic leaderships were uninspiringly similar, cut from the SalTIe European cloth, and utterly disconnected from the thoughts and actions of the people each purported to unite under a single banner. While tbat view may be historically accurate for the original formulation of some European national ideologies, it fails to explain what happens thereafter: the continuing appeal (and ceaseless reformulation) of nationalism in public discourse and its shaping by the actual people whose values it claims to invoke. To argue, as Gellner does, that massive education creates the common culture does not account for the predisposition that makes such a process possible. l

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Introducing Cultural Intimacy

Here the historian Hobsbawm, with his construct of "popular proto-nationalism" (1990: 46-79), comes closer to the anthropological emphasis on local-level values. Unfortunately, bowever, the range of models he elects to categorize in this way is, as we should perhaps have expected from his earlier writings; restricted to those in which a self-aware form of ideology building can be detected. This emphasis on conscious intellectual activity eventually leads to a despairing conclusion: "We know too little about what went on, or for that matter what still goes on, in the minds of most relatively inarticulate men and women, to speak with any confidence about their thoughts and feelings towards the nationalities and nation-states which claim their feelings" (Hobsbawm 1990: 78, my emphasis). But innermost thoughts are never accessible, despite the rhetoric of hearts and minds, and so the role of local values is once again elided in a Marxist-derived, top-down understanding of ideology not so very different, in this regard, frmn the strongly anti-Marxist Gellner's. Pragmatically, it is true, Hobsbawm is right: written records are rarely a promising source for popular, "relatively inarticulate" social ideologies. 8 The focus on cultural intimacy works against this static, elitist, and conflationary reading. Its data are ethnographic and are of a kind often summarily dismissed as mere anecdote. But who sets the boundary between importance and mereness? There is a suspiciously close convergence berw-een the refusal to take ethnographic detail seriously and the homogeneity enjoined by nationalist ideologies. In chapter 6, I address in greater detail the political logic that animates such criticisms of anthropology, which in turn, through its resolute insistence on the significance of the particular, is thus able to document how nationalism is understood (and sometimes recast) by living social actors. There is no doubt that luany nationalist ideologies are externally alike, as Gellner and others have claimed, but that is no reason to ignore the highly localized specificities that sometimes give nationalism distinctive meaning in an enormous range of cultural and social settings. These specificities emerge in the intimate social spaces explored by ethnographers. Here it might be useful to consider the role of language learning for anthropological understanding. While the use of interpreters used to be collllllonplace, it has yielded today to a realization that the truly engaged field anthropologist must be able to "listen in" on conversations to which outsiders are rarely privy. Access to such conversations is ethically fraught, and I will 11

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return to the ethical issues associated with cultural intimacy in the concluding chapter. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there are powerful reasons for seeking that access when, for examplc, we realize that official accounts relegate ordinary people's views and experiences to the margins. Indeed, while I ordinarily oppose the employment of interpreters in the field, they do have one obvious use: when they are officially appointed, a canny ethnographer can learn a great deal from noting what they do not translate. The recognition that local actors may not always agrce with official renditions of history has taken a surprisingly long time to come into focus. Edwin Ardener's (1975) notion of "englobing" did, however, suggest the possibility of a reading that could symbolically subordinate state autbority to local concerns. Studies of archaeological sites such as Masada in Israel (Bruner and Gorfain 1984; sec also Handehnan 1990) and Colonial Williamsburg in the United States (Gable, Handler, and Lawson 1992), and of historic conservation in Greece (Herzfeld 1991a), all suggest the possibility of the subtle recastings of official discourses that we might call counterinventions of tradition, in which local and minority groups variously (and often discordantly) propose a bost of alternative pasts. Oral memories of the Spanish fascists) attempt to incorporatc the population of Galicia through forced labor on a massive road construction program (Roseman 1996), or of events mythologized by the historians of civil strife in both Greece and Spain (Collard 1989; Hart 1996; Mintz 1982), tell a new set of stories. Rethinking the tangle of multiple pasts often happens in the intimate spaces of culture. That such processes often use bodily and kinship metaphors is not evidence of some cultural inability to think beyond immediate social experience but simply shows that members of local communities think about the state through lllany of the same categories as those through which state officials woo local opinion. If public officials adopt familistic rhetoric to command loyalty or court votes-the current debate about family values in the United States offers a striking case in point-it is because that rhetoric demonstrably works. But it also has its price: as many European and American politicians have discovered, they become answerable to the demands of this simulacrmll of moral family leadership. In other cases the image of domestic harmony becomes exposed to its concomitant logic of fraternal strife-as in Lebanon, for example (although King Hussein's farewell to "my 12

Introducing Cultural Intimacy

brother" Rabin showed tbat even the bitterness of metaphorically internecine feuds can be reversed). Indeed, Greek peasants explain civil and international strife in terms of embattled siblings, whose intense mutual affection can all too easily be transmuted into an equally intense struggle over the division of their parents' property; that property becomes territory in the case of the nation-state's relationship with neighboring countries like Turkey.9 David Sutton (1997) has argued that the passions stirred in Greece by the struggle over the name Macedonia only become comprehensible in light of the tight mutual association of affect, land, and personhood in the traditional transmission of names,1° Greek politicians have certainly hoth exploited and been swept along by the resulting tide of popular sentiment. These familial metapbors show that conceptually the nationstate is constructed out of intimacy, which can also recompose its geopolitical claims. Three superficially, very different cases illustrate the principle. First, for the Wakuenai of Venezuelan Amazonia the very idea of nation-states whose borders cut across their own territorial boundaries is both immoral and dangerous. By treating Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela as merely three additional named groups that came, logically and morally, after the Wakuenai's own sibs and even those of neighboring tribes (Hill 1990: 127, 1993: 37-38), Wakuenai incorporate all three nationstate names into their own kinship format, treating them as nothing more than a set of subunits of a local entity, and so symbolically invert the power relations between tbemselves and the intrusive nation-state entities historically grounded in European domination and a European model of the nation-state. In my second example, from New Zealand, some Maori traced national origius to tbe Jews who escaped from Egypt; this not only furnished a parable of deliverance from subjugation but also, by transforming analogy into genealogy, relegated the colonial Christian missionaries to the status of "younger brothers" (Schwimmer 1990: 29-31). Although this kind of inversion does not provide an effective means of resistance in itself, it may furnish the requisite first step in that direction; in the Maori case, it appears to have done so. Sometimes, to turn to my third illustration, this kind of reformulation can appear right in the heart of Europe, where its more direct articulation with the dominant political idiOlll gives it the real potential to make a difference in the struggle for self13

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determination. Here cartography is a potent weapon, turning linguistic and religious groupings into new national entitiesa visual rhetoric of acknowledged efficacy. Thus, Basque cartography of Southern and Northern Basqueland works "in symbolic defiance of the Spanish/French border, which has divided the Basque provinces into separate states, separate juridico-administrative entities, and separate histories since the sixteenth century" (Urla 1993: 825). These tactics deny the legitimacy of dominant state powers. Again, their actual effectiveness may be constrained by demographic, economic, and institutional limitations, but they do furnish elnergent ethnic solidarities with expressive force and direction within the carefully guarded spaces of cultural intimacy from which they may later emerge in resplendently militant and public form.'l

Disemia and the Coding of Intimacy 1 offer the concept of cultural intimacy as an antidote to the formalism of cultural nationalism. It expresses in more directly political terms the dynamic that I bad earlier sought to clarify through the luore formalistic notion of disemia-the formal or coded tension between official self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of collective introspection. While the official aspect is a legitimate (and indeed necessary) object of ethnographic analysis, the intimacy it masks is the subject of a deep sense of cultural and political vulnerability. The tension between official and vernacular cultural forms has long been familiar to sociolinguists under the name of "diglossia," a situation in which a national language is split between two "registers" or social dialects: a formal and often deliberately archaic idiom used mostly for official purposes, and the ordinary speech of everyday life (Ferguson 1959). In diglossic situations, the so-called "high" register often requires access to scarce educational resources. It becomes a device of social, political, and economic exclusion; in Greece, the locus classicus for this phenOluenon, peasants sometimes needed interpreters in courts of law. In time, however, these arcane languages increasingly merge with vernacular forms, in which formal archaisms may indeed become a sOurce of popular irony at the expense of the powerful-a reversal that illustrates my central theme. The concept of disemia, however, expands the narrowly linguistic frame of diglossia. It does not ignore language, but 14

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contextualizes it as part of a semiotic continuum that includes silence, gesture, nlusic, the built environment, and economic, civic, and social values. Architecture may well be its most obvious expression: stylized stucco Ionic columns may mask the simple intimacies of a Turkish-style domestic space or the more bodily and gendered ones of a lingerie shop. And while this model may still superficially appear to support a binary split betweeu elite and ordinary people, that division is part of the code itself, not of the social world that uses it: anyone can claim elite or hUluble status, but these attributions are always contested in the play of social interaction. The binarislu belongs to the code itself; it does not describe the heterogeneous and shifting social world in which people nevertheless use it to establish their own claims to power and distiuction. 12 Above all, its very formality makes it capable of conveying the most exquisite irony; literal readings often compound that irony by falliug into the traps it sets. A historiau of China, Charlotte Furth, has made the point that not all binarism arises from the imperial project of orientalism, but that billarism may in fact prove useful for describing the consequences of that project: "Binaries come with the. necessary activity of making distinctions, and narrative strategies give linguistic distinctions entitivity" (Furth 1995: 998)-a point that demonstrates the material significance of the symbolic. Within a political structure defining the shape of cultural identity, people are constantly and ineluctably drawn into binary choices. Nationstate ideologies tend to divide the world into Manichaean pairs and to coerce or seduce their citizens into adopting the same rhetoric for the moral organization of their own everyday social relations. But people's actual uses of that rhetoric may be deliberately irreverent or even su bversive. Binarism often is, in fact, a key ordering principle of political inequality.13 Gelles (1995) has cogently argued that the dualistic systems of Andean societies, long associated by structuralists with ritual and with marriage rules, actually derive from indigenous ideas about political hierarchy, possibly even reinforced in the colonial period by similar features in Spanish social ideology. Political relations are in any case oppositional virtually by definition. Political identities, including nationalisms, are contrastive with regard to each other; this, as Spicer (1992) and others have argued, is the basis of ethnogenesis. Concomitantly, such identities also become contrastive in the tension between self-promoting 15

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and introspective stereotypes. The content of thcse stereotypes is unstable. This is because what gives theln their significance is not so much their actual form-what Gellner mistook for the unifonn content of nationalist ideologies-as the social uses to which they are put. The confluence of stereotypes, their use in social interaction, and their necessarily unstable evocation of competing histories is the defining object of a social poetics, especially of a social poetics coucerned with life in the context of the nation-state. The disemia concept may work best for countries with an ambiguous relationship to ideal images of a powerful culture, in which both formalism and irony provide important resources for political negotiation. The foreign-dominated Greek state adopted the glorious name of Hellenes, as a more powerful evocation of great power interests than the more intimate and little-known Romii. 14 State formation often gives rise to this Janus-like adoption of a dual identity, balancing foreign-directed display against sometimes rueful introversion. Spicer (1992: 32) notes examples of native American peoples whose self-designations (ethnonyms), hidden from the supercilious inspection of encompassing state structures much as the identity of the Romii was concealed from the "phil hellenic" great powers of Western Europe, evoke precisely this sense of intimate self-knowledge. Such categorical shyness mocks the failure of the powerful to penetrate the innermost lives of the dominated. These pairings of external and internal ethnic names signal an important consequence of conquest and other forms of domination. Pnt quite simply, it is that the official devalnation of the culture of the conquered may become a source of secret pride. This may lead to the adoption of once derogatory group names during a period of collective regrouping, as has happened with several of the designators for Mrican-Americans (notably Blacks) and with the contemptuous term Turk, adopted as a matter of state policy in the aftermatb of the overthrow of the Ottoman rulers of what then became Turkey}5 Subnational strivings for greater autonomy may give rise to other, related articulations of disemia. Bretons) rejecting both French state control over tbeir persons and the authority of the official medical establishment, turn for the curing of a wide range of a'ilments to New Age formulations that combine arcane local knowledge with the scientistic rhetoric of rays and waves (Badone 1991). These are practices that make interior knowledge a mark

16

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of intimacy as well as security. In Sicily, as Jane and Peter Schneider (1994) have argued, the widely approved cultural doctrine of sicilianismo rejects the national (Italian) condemnation of Mafia values as both peculiarly Sicilian and thoroughly wicked, and tries to reframe these as a trenchantly local moral response to domination by the manifestly corrupt Italian state. This is a defensive posture vis-a-vis the central authorities, but, very Inuch like "interior ethnonyms," it is proactive in promoting a sense of local cultural and moral autonomy and dignity. Such devices disturb externally imposed models of cultural superiority. Yet they may also long outlast the force of arms or wealth that elevated those models to dominance in the first place. In the Balkans and southern Europe generally (see Maddox 1993: 14), the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East (see Orlove and Bauer 1996)-places where the Once monolithic authority of northwestern Europe has lost much of its practical force-the touchstone of cultural hierarchy is still commonly a generalized notion of Europe. In Greece) Romania, and Spain, the idea that these countries are today supplicants for fully European identity is a raw expression of international cultural politics supported by powerful local elites. The allure of "Euro-style" imports (including Parisian intellectual fashions) follows a similar logic even in the fanner colonies of the United States, demonstrating how tenaciously hierarcnies of style lllay survive the collapse or inversion of hierarchies of military and economic power. Globally reproducing the dynamic described by Friedl (1964) as "lagging emulation" (which for her meant peasant imitation of city fashions), the changing global meanings of disemia may thus show great sluggishness through time. In England, the defeated Anglo-Saxons gave their name to a cultural ideology of blunt common sense and four-letter words, set against the elegance and formality of its imperial Latin precursors and soon-to-be-aristocratic French conquerors: as with the Greek play of Hellenic and Romeic, the Saxon Kuh- and Sehweinherds who assured their Norman masters a plentiful supply of breuf and pore stand metaphorically for ideologically contrasted cultural identities, both of which all social actors internalize and selectively deploy. In the American example, again, the poles of di.semia are an almost sycophantic adulation toward the cultures of the European anciens regimes on the one hand, and contempt for Europeans' alleged stuffiness and rigid sense of hierarchy on the other.

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Context determines which side of this uncomfortable ambiguity predominates. Any European who too eagerly or literally accepts American friends' cultural obeisance soon learns due caution. While American admiration for "Europe" is often couched in terms of nostalgia for a time of cultural finesse-the OldJNew World doublet nicely conveys the conversion of historical time into cultural space 16-it is matched by an equally powerful nostalgia for the communal simplicity emblematized by the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the artifacts of near-defunct groups such as the Shakers.l7 Such ambivalences may also appear in countries, such as Portugal and Russia, that are simultaneously recent colonial powers and impoverished members of the global community of nations. Russians are often ambivalent about the European aspect of their identity, while their neighbors in Finland have challenged their claims to civilization itself (see Wilson 1976: 132). 1u Spain, too, the proximity of ~